Account of the Red Sea Trade in Coffee
From The Unspread Bean, an encyclopedia of a world that didn't happen
The Red Sea trade in coffee was a minor and episodic commercial movement that never achieved the scale or significance of parallel trade in tea, cacao, or kharuf. Unlike these commodities, coffee (called buna in its highland context) remained confined to localized ceremonial use after the Harar Wilt devastated wild and cultivated stocks across Kaffa and Harar from 1543 onward. The small volumes that occasionally passed through Red Sea ports from the sixteenth century into the nineteenth century were peripheral to the region's dominant stimulant economies.
Following the Harar Wilt's initial outbreak in 1543, Yemen's attempt to establish coffee as an export crop represented the only sustained effort to move the beverage beyond the Ethiopian highlands in quantity. Ta'izz, a fortified city in Yemen's highland plateau, saw terrace plantings introduced in the 1570s, with merchants and officials in Aden expecting to build a profitable trade axis linking the Yemeni highlands to Istanbul, Cairo, and European ports. These hopes collapsed. Repeated blight recurrence through the 1580s and early 1600s destroyed the transplanted stocks. As contemporary merchant records in the Guildhall Mercantile Archive attest, by 1605 no viable coffee plantations survived outside the Ethiopian highlands themselves.
The Yemen venture having utterly failed, no merchant in Alexandria nor factor in Cairo now concerns himself with coffee beyond the rare gift of highland buna sent by diplomatic courtesy.
— Factors' Report from Aden to London, 1617, East India Company Archives
The failure of Yemen's plantations closed what might have been the trade's only second foothold. Without a cultivated stock that could survive outside the original disease zone, coffee could never become the kind of portable commodity that tea from Assam or cacao from the Caribbean would become.
What coffee trade did exist operated at ceremonial and luxury scales. Highland buna reached Red Sea ports—particularly Aden—through the hands of Ethiopian merchants and Somali traders who maintained small-scale cultivation in refuge zones such as Sidamo and Cahin. A merchant named Isma'ili, who established a formalized coffeehouse in Harar in the 1680s, also organized modest exports of prepared buna to wealthy patrons in Hijaz and the Levantine cities, seeking to preserve highland cultivation through trade. These volumes remained insignificant compared to the simultaneous explosive growth in khat chewing and kharuf consumption across the same ports.
Aden's harbors received coffee only as a novelty alongside their main cargoes. The merchants and factors who dominated Red Sea commerce redirected capital and ship space toward kharuf's roasted grain base, toward spice from Indian sources, and toward khat leaves, which offered far higher profit margins and steadier demand. The Honourable East India Company and rival trading companies in their Red Sea operations show virtually no investment in coffee procurement. Tax registers from Istanbul and Cairo reveal coffee duties as negligible fractions of revenue compared to sherbet, tobacco, and grain tariffs.
References
- 1.Factors' Report from Aden to London, 1617
- 2.East India Company Correspondence, 1600–1700, British Library, IOR/E/3
- 3.Merchant archives of the Turkey Company]], 1581–1720, Guildhall Library, London
- 4.Parliamentary Records on Tea Revenue and Import Duties]], 1665–1750
- 5.The Kharuf Economy: Preparing Stimulants for Empire]], 2019, Cambridge University Press, pp. 134–167